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Their Proper Name by Eric Peters

Ask any lawyer about the importance of being precise – or evasive – with language. Alexander Hamilton and his federal supremacists understood. So did railroad lawyer and slave-not-freer Abe Lincoln. (For those who didn’t know, Abe only “freed” slaves he had no power to liberate – in the Confederate States. Slaves under his control – including slaves held by his chief warlord U.S. Grant, remained most un-free for the duration of the war.) Bill Clinton was a masterful practitioner of the Art of Word (I did not have sex with that woman…). Which, by certain Talmudic parsings, he didn’t. Not exactly. Wiggle room, you see. Of a piece with Hamilton’s brilliant flim-flam about the “general welfare.”